And that is why, when the music was silent in Culpepper Hall, and the tall young man walked slowly home alone, as he clicked his own gate behind him, he brought from his pocket two little white gloves,--just two ordinary white gloves,--and held them to his lips and lifted his arms in despair once and let them drop as he stood before his doorstep. And that is why a girl, a little girl with the weariest face in the town, looked out of her bedroom window that night and whispered over and over to herself the name she dared not speak. And all this was going on while the town was turning over in its bed, listening to the most tumultuous charivari that Sycamore Ridge has ever known. Night after night that summer faithful Jake Dolan walked the streets of Sycamore Ridge with Bob Hendricks. By day they lived apart, but at night the young man often would look up the elder, and they would walk and walk together, but never once did Hendricks mention Molly's name nor refer to her in any way; yet Jake Dolan knew why they walked abroad. How did he know? How do we know so many things in this world that are neither seen nor heard? And the Irish--they have the drop of blood that defies mathematics; the Irish are the only people in the world whom kind Providence permits to add two and two together to make six. "You say 'tis four," said Dolan, one night, as he and Hendricks stood on the bridge listening to the roar from the dam. "I say 'tis six. There is this and there is that and you say they make the other. Not at all; they make something else entirely different. You take your two and your two and make your four and try your four on the world, and it works--yes, it works up to a point; but there is something left over, something unexplained; you don't know what. I do. It's the other two. Therefore I say to you, Mr. Robert Hendricks, that two and two make six, because God loves the Irish, and for no other reason on earth." So much for the dreams of Molly, the memories of Bob, and the vagaries of Mr. Dolan. They were as light as air. But in John Barclay's life a vision was rising--a vision that was real, palpable, and vital; a vision of wealth and power,--and as the days and the months passed, the shadow of that vision grew big and black and real in a score of lives. CHAPTER XV